Our Story

Welcome to Mahan Woodwinds!

A bit about me: I’ve been playing the tinwhistle since around 1997, and have always been fascinated with making my own whistles. In 2005, I bought woodworking equipment and started learning the craft. I produced my first whistle a few months later. Unfortunately, a couple of years later, I had to move because of work and had to sell almost all of my woodworking equipment.

In 2015, 3D printing was still in its infancy, and I made an April Fool’s Day joke with my whistle friends about duplicating famous makers’ whistles using scanning technology. It was just a joke, but the idea always stuck with me. A few years later, the technology had matured quite a bit, so I dusted off all my old wooden-whistle diagrams and notes and tried to design a whistle that could be 3D printed. It was a dismal failure. I just wasn’t getting the quality that I wanted, and hiring someone to modify prototypes in CAD software, and then shipping them to a 3rd party printing company became prohibitively expensive.

In 2023, I got an inexpensive 3D printer on loan from a friend, and was shocked at how much things had improved! I caught the 3D printing bug, and was soon making all kinds of toys, gadgets and household items. One of my friends reminded me of my previous efforts in making a whistle. Initially, I brushed it off, but soon the idea caught fire in my brain again. I learned enough modeling skills in Fusion 360 to transform all of my notes and designs into an engineering file, and the very next day, I had a playable whistle in my hands! It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough that I knew that if I just kept tweaking the shape files, I’d eventually produce a whistle that I wouldn’t be ashamed to hang my name on.

Scores of prototypes later, I had a repeatable process to make a good whistle, and began selling them in a limited fashion. And now I feel ready to hang out my shingle and offer them to the world!